Don’t believe it until you see it. But keep your eyes open – it will be worth it.

For a long time now, Google has been promising us that they will start to index Flash. That day has not come yet. But now there is another storm of noise as Google, Yahoo and Adobe start collaborating to enable indexing Flash.

But don’t start running to your designers to okay that beautiful Flash design you rejected last week because of your SEO needs – it’s likely to be a very long time before this becomes a reality. Not just because it’s tough to do and involves coordinating development teams of some of the worlds most prominent companies – ultimately, Flash developers may likely be required to develop sites differently in order to make them indexable.

Who will benefit? And who will lose?
The interactive agencies will have a picnic when this comes to fruition.
And all the big brands and Internet giants will enjoy it as well.
The ones who suffer, in the short term at least, will be the little guys and this is a real shame – to watch the Internet become less and less a level playing field. Once we could really say it was level, then for a while we could fool ourselves into thinking it was, then we found lots of techniques for keeping it somewhat fair game; but now – we know it is not. And over time, it looks like the barriers to entry (or to traffic) are only getting higher and more costly.

We always tell our clients to avoid focusing on SEO. It deserves serious attention and should be a part of the marketing mix. But don’t obsess. At the same time, when a client’s design team wants to use Flash, we guide them towards a healthy balance, so as not to harm their search engine ranking aspirations. The idea that sites could start to integrate more flash and stop worrying about the search engines and concentrate more on design is certainly good news. But in the short term, it will clearly give a boost to the big guys who are typically more reliant on Flash and will have the budgets to make the needed adaptations once the best practices are established.

Keep your eyes peeled.